1. Field of the Invention
Methods and apparatuses consistent with the present invention relate to transmitting a residential Ethernet stream and, more particularly to a method of and an apparatus for transmitting a residential Ethernet stream, which transmits data frames of a mono-cycle traffic model having one bandwidth according to a multi-cycle traffic model having a plurality of bandwidths in a residential Ethernet network to improve a utilization of data frames.
2. Description of the Related Art
Current residential Ethernet networks connect various types of household appliances such as televisions (TVs), digital versatile discs (DVDs), etc. to one Ethernet network and control the operations of the respective nodes through controllers.
For example, the residential Ethernet networks can be included in the home network service and connected to illumination devices, audio devices, plasma display panel (PDP) TVs, DVD players, or the like through a home server controlling the home network service.
Such a residential Ethernet network is connected to an external network to cover a designated residential area, and includes a gateway in the residential area and network nodes connected to the gateway.
In addition, the residential Ethernet network transmits data frames in a predetermined cycle. The predetermined cycle may have the pacing of 125 micro-seconds (μs) as shown in FIG. 1. The residential Ethernet network provides synchronizations among the nodes and transmits data frames 110 of a predetermined size in the cycle of 125 μs using sync bits of a media access control (MAC) layer.
A residential Ethernet network transmitting data frames in a predetermined cycle as described above stores the data frames transmitted from a random node in a random cycle in a buffer register of a gateway, and transmits the data frames to a destination node in the next cycle.
Accordingly, the residential Ethernet network transmits the data frames in a mono-cycle traffic model having pacing of 125 μs as shown in FIG. 1. Thus, the transmitted data frames have a low bandwidth. As a result, a transmission overhead occurs, and thus bandwidths are wasted due to other unused bandwidths. Therefore, the utilization of bandwidths is deteriorated.